Knowing The Sea In The 'Time Of Progress'
Environmental Change, Parallel Knowledges And The Uses Of Metaphor In Kerala (South India)

This text considers how knowledge change is expressed in speech, focusing on the members of a community of fisherfolk who have experienced several decades of dramatic social, economic and environmental change. It draws on fourteen months of fieldwork in Chamakkala, a coastal village in the South Indian state of Kerala. The village's fishermen, mostly Hindus, commonly subsume recent developments and changes, whether in the sea, in fishing, in the village, or in the world at large as pertaining to the 'time of progress'.